Saturday, 21 December 2013

LOW WATER WALKING

A couple of weeks back i took my dogs for their usual long weekend walk along Benfleet Creek as a change to our local haunt of South Fambridge. I guess i should of checked my tide app as when we got there it was at dead low water so there basically wasn,t any water for Harry to have a swim. It was a shame as he does love the water, and sometimes i have a right job to get him out of it when we have to go. Unfortunately Oscar doesn,t like to swim, he can swim but just chooses not too. He,s happy just running around splatting in the mud and searching through the scrub grass.

Anyway, as we were walking along the creek i was taking note of the gully left behind by the receded tide. In places it came within 10 yards of the bank where i was, and also in a couple of places the water was a foot or so deeper than the average. I know this as Harry was wading through the remaining water and i was keeping an eye on how far up his legs/belly the water was.

Seeing all this mud and the deep gully running through it made me think of years gone by when i used to do a bit of flounder fishing in this creek. I didn,t often fish the area i was walking, but fished opposite on the Canvey side around the speed boat area as well a from the wharfe in Old Leigh. The most productive area was from the wharfe in Leigh, i used to sit on the bench and just flick my light leads into the gully and let it gently roll with the tide until it came to a rest and more often than not a rattle on the rod tip would soon appear. I caught some cracking flounder
that way and still use the technique now where ever i might be sea fishing.
My biggest flounder came to this technique and also at Old Leigh after i hadgone pike fishing during the afternoon but had found the lakes to be frozen so without a second thought i shot over to the wharfe and fished strips of mackeral to try and tempt a flattie. I ended up after a couple of hours fishing with 4 flounder over 1.5lb and the biggest over 2lb. Great fun as i only used to have 2lb tc carp rods which i used for my piking so when a flounder was hooked it fought really well on these light rods.

I took a picture of these old timbers as a friend of mine told me that these were the remains of the bridge legs that used to span the creek for the train to go over. I don,t know how many years ago this was, it was a lot though i,m sure. They are still as strong as ever and you wouldn,t be able to break them if you tried